TigerEatsCow

I am like a hawk. 

The hawk takes in its teeth and talons the will to live. 

What is the will to live?

To eat. 

Because I am like a hawk, I am alive. 

How does a hawk see the day? 

A day is not the sun, not the night, not the rooster shrieking in the morning or the chirp and hoots of the creatures that haunt the darkness. A day is what you say it is–can you measure it in time? You can. You are a human, you are not like a hawk. To see each day, you must sleep. 

I am always awake; I am not like a hawk. 

There is no measurement of days where I live. But there is food, and lots of it–I do not suffer for food, I do not pay for food, I do not wish for food, so I am not like you. But we both need to eat, and so we are similar. Was I ever like you? I do not remember. Like you, my memory is not always clear, though memory is nothing more than a story. 

I prey on one thing, one thing only. I harvest trees. It is my specialty. I have not been doing it forever, only for a few hundred years, and there is no one like me in the place that I wonder, or none yet that I have met. Here is what it looks like, the place where I walk every day alone: it is very much like your nature, except it is efficiently organized, and where there is rock and where there is water, there is also nothing else. There are no fish, there are no plants, just rocks and sand, wind and rain. Sometimes when I dip a claw into the water, I hope it will feel warm or cold, but it is never the case, and I am left neither surprised nor content. Rocks here are neither warm nor cold, and so when I touch them I cannot feel the sun’s rays, although it is always sunny. If you were to drink the water here, you could not get sick. Maybe you would want to visit because your water is dirty, but I do not think you ever could. 

Would you like it here, if it was always sunny? I do not know. I do not know.

I have seen what you call a nighttime, but here there is always sun. It is starless. The air here is always the same temperature as I am. There is wind, but it gasps – no whooshes, no screams.

Oh, but there is rain! And when it rains I would delight. If only I did not know the source of the rain I would catch it on my tongue or in my beak if it did not taste of salt. Rain here is saltier than the sea. Rain here is made of tears. 

I said the world was like yours. There are rocks, and sand, and water. Though there is no grass and no greenery there were small amounts of trees that grew in the periphery in which you measure decades, months, years, terrorist bombings, and hurricanes. They were first scattered everywhere and mostly plentiful, so I never had to starve of thirst or die of stomach pain. I am aware the trees here are not like yours. Trees here are pink, like bubblegum, or reddish, like cherry candy, and they taste of it, too. They are sticky, like taffy, and they get stuck in your teeth and talons. When it is sunny (and it is always sunny) they shimmer. Flecks of sun sometimes bounce off of them and might blind you. But I can look at the sun and still see. Sometimes when I want to feel human, I stretch the goo from the trees out like putty and wrap it around my fingers (claws?) like a child might. I use my claws or teeth to cut parts of the sticky stuff out and turn it into long ropes that I spin like coils of hair. Before I started to eat the trees, I did not know what sticky meant or what it felt like, or what I felt like. You brought me those things and those words, and I am grateful. 

Time here is non-linear, and there was once a time when there were no trees. When I existed in that time I was never hungry or thirsty because I did not understand it. You had not yet showed me. Back then, I bathed in the water and flew around the world and saw every rock and looked for signs of anything that would make me curious. I was neither happy nor sad, I simply was, before the trees came. But I barely remember that memory now. It is like static, a buzz in my mind that I sometimes sniff like a smell or a taste that lingers for mere seconds before it is lost. It is only a story.

When the first one sprouted a few hundred years ago, I had never seen a tree before. Trees I did not know, but it came to me and told me it was a tree, and it would nourish me. What did nourish mean, I asked it? It told me to lick it and swallow it like water, and so I did, because I had been commanded before and I did understand what it was asking and so when I took the first bite, and then my fifteenth bite, and then my fiftieth, it was too late, and I craved the trees because they trained me to. 

They really do taste like bubblegum and cherry. They are both sweet and sour, ripe like thick juicy berries, very slick but also sticky and slimy, and I use these words because the more I consumed the the trees the more I learned from you, and that you slept and watched stars, and that you had a moon, and you were small or had long braided hair or had trees that were green in your world. The more trees I consumed in my home, the more I looked for pink trees in yours. Your trees are part of you. They feed you something called carbon dioxide. I learned this much later, after the first few hundred years with my trees. You taught me. You taught me age, and childhood, and worry, and anguish, and you taught me things like power and love and death and life. But you did not teach me hunger. Only the bubblegum trees that sprouted from rock could teach me that.

The more I ate the more I wanted to know, and the more you kept coming. At first you showed me revolutions, tea, and silks. You told me of your people and your families. I saw courtyards where you tended to cherry blossoms and festivals where you wore red. I saw deep jungles where you hung tree frogs from their legs and stuck arrows down their throats. I saw buildings of wood and blood and milk and maps. I saw great ships, piles of gold and spices. I saw men in red coats and men with black beards. I saw houses nailed and futures made and there were so many trees that I was never empty. 

But then something happened, one day, and I am not sure how. I began to see more trees root in the ground and shoot up like sticks and grow candy surfaces that wouldn’t melt in the sun. The rocks I had explored had turned into carpets of forests of trees, masses of red and pink, gummies made from blood and milk, and that is when I saw the first arm.

It was sticking out of a tree, and it was horrifying. I had known horror because I had seen it and eaten it as I had eaten the trees. 

More limbs grew from more trees. And then two eyes in their sockets appeared one day on a sticky cherry leaf, and when I tasted them they did not taste like cherry, and I almost spit them out. It did not stop. Half-humans appeared in the trees, or what I assume makes half a human. 

I learned bones were not chewy and they shattered my teeth. Bones my talons would not snap. Hearts still rising before they bled out from one artery. Little fingers that came in multiple sizes of variations. Fingernails, that I choked on and spit. And then began the moans. They were moans of horror, and the more trees sprung, the more I heard their cries, and the sky filled with salty rain that beat down on my wings. It washed my feathers and burned my eyes and cleansed the mouth sores made from splinters. 

One tree sprung up a decade ago I cannot stop thinking about. It was made of children’s arms. There were no heads and tails (I think you call them legs), just arms, and they all reached out and grabbed things, and tried to grab me, and told me what I was, gave me a name for the first time. I was not human, I was not bone, I was not hawk, and I was not them or you–I was what they called a vulture. I was death, 死亡, muertre. I was an altar, they told me, with their little high-pitched voices. We are an offering, they told me, an offering, and where is my mom? I want my mom? And I heard bells in the distance as the arms disintegrated into waxy clumps, moving like lava, congealing with lymph and tears.

Peace is what you asked for. You said: give us peace, after death, let us whither and sprout no longer, let us not be trees here, let us be memories, let us become whispers in air and not limbs stuck in trees. What is our purpose, if we go like this?

That is what they told me, as I wept and my tears fell from the sky, your tears, too.

A voice like a drum shouted thoughts and prayers, and then laughed gleefully, and I could sometimes see a face, half-human, half-metal, delivering the lines.

There is something very strange to me about humans, and that is purpose. Purpose is uncertain and intangible for me, but I think it is a feeling of must. It is your hunger. I must do this, I am called to it, like a hidden trance of destiny or by the poets in the sky. Secondly, there is something very strange to me about the human body, and that is waste. Waste is very tangible and certain for human bodies, but it is not something you and I share. When a tree is stuffed through my skull or beak or talons or bony digits, it passes on, somewhere else, and becomes windy and soft and then the tree is gone. The waste moves through me but I cannot see it or feel it, it simply is. I am an altar, and when you pass, you rest. You have peace. 

I am a vulture because I must eat death, because it is my will to live, because these trees must pass through me. Death, they say, is awful and merciless and cruel. I have seen all of those things, but the way you all die is strange, and the way I understand death is strange. 

I think I am beginning to go mad with desire for knowledge about the pattern in which you all die. 

Can I ask you a question: why do you all die by the same tool? And how did you come about, hundreds of years ago, when I see your memories? In those memories you talk of lands that are much older, of people that have passed before you and have transitioned from are to were. I thought that, like the trees, you sprung up once, perhaps out of that thing called grass, or branch, or corn. But now I think you did not come from the ground. For if you sprung up one day from grass, then you would not have spoken of the times you call the past. You all die the same way. But your memories tell me that way must be a lie, for some of you come to me with memories of coughs, and bloodshot eyes. With leaking craters of pus and black sludgey skin. With memories of frailty, of dark spots on hands rivered with wrinkles. They look like a map of a coast, dotted with tide pools, little creatures, divots in the rock. But I never taste sea water, only metal.

I know there are others like me, on other lands where there is no sun and there are only stars; where there is no water and only desert; only plains and no sea. But here is where I am, and here is where you are, and as your death, I must confess to you that I am not evil, and I am not swift, and I am random and thankless and confused and neither hot nor cold. 

You showed up in my desert. I did not ask for it. 

Is this the only way to die? I imagine on other worlds, there are creatures that welcome those who have not died like you have. And I imagine I was chosen only for your specific type of death. Somewhere I was sorted into a category of deathkeeper or reaper and it terrifies me to think of why I was chosen for this. Before you came, before I was aware of you, of how you died, there was no peace. There was nothing. But at least that nothing was plain. At least that nothing was simple. Now I am tormented, like you, and I consume your torment so that you can move on. 

Do you know what the trees are made of? They are made of your parent’s milk, of your flesh, of your blood. They taste like cherries to me and gum and berries and sweetness and sourness and it is sickening how delicious it is, how it waters in my mouth, the juices of children, adults, old ladies in the supermarket.

Regular trees where you come from are made of things called cells, little green armies of them, that grow from the sun and help you breathe. When you come to me as fleshy trees with your limbs and eyes and genitals sticking out you are no longer taking breaths from lungs, those things that look like roots. It is horrifying. What have you done to me? You have populated this land, my land, with gummy canopies of candy that stretch as far as the horizon now, and I can barely see my rocks or swim in my water, because your flesh is now oozing over the streams.

Now instead of stillness the oceans quake with the vibrations from sprouting trees, and the floods of saltwater erode the desert I have loved. They crack the rocks like lightning and soil the dryness.

There is one good thing that I have observed of late: the more trees sprout and forest here the more I feel nothing. Eventually, more of you will die, and the more I will eat, the less I will think. The more I will consume, the more I will grow unfeeling. It has already begun, I have already begun to feel it. It makes it easy. I know when I devour, you pass. That is grace. 

I ask: What is my job?

I answer: To eat. 

Food is something very human. It requires creativity and it requires knowledge of land and nature. But here is the secret to food: the more you eat of one food, the blander it becomes. Anything in excess makes it less special. Eventually, after your thirtieth, or thirty-thousandth, or thirty-millionth bite, it begins to lose its taste. You become bored. What taste once excited you or repulsed you, your body has gotten used to. 

That is how it is for me now. 

I am always awake; I am not like a hawk. 

I am always awake; I am not like a human.

I am never hungry; I am not like a hawk.

I am never hungry; I am not like a human.

I am always alive; I am not like a hawk.

I am always alive; I am not like a human.

I am not predator; I am not like a hawk.

I am not predator; I am not like a human. 

I am not prey; I am not like a human.